# Large Language Models Discriminate Against Speakers of German Dialects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03882/) (2023)
- [Aya Expanse: Combining Research Breakthroughs for a New Multilingual Frontier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04261/) (2024)
- [Measuring Implicit Bias in Explicitly Unbiased Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04105/) (2024)
- [Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11005/) (2024)
- [Native vs Non-Native Language Prompting: A Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07054/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Different Demographic Cues Yield Inconsistent Conclusions About LLM Personalization and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18486/) (2026)
- [Topics as Proxies for Sociodemographics: How Conversational Context Affects LLM Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02776/) (2026)
- [BavGround: A Benchmark for Regional Cultural Grounding and Dialect Competence in Bavarian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12894/) (2026)
- [Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16852/) (2026)
- [The Hrunting of AI: Where and How to Improve English Dialectal Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15187/) (2026)
- [Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20695/) (2026)
- [textitVersteasch du mi? Computational and Socio-Linguistic Perspectives on GenAI, LLMs, and Non-Standard Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28213/) (2026)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)
- [From Standard English to Singlish: A Retrieval-Augmented Approach for Code-Switched Creole Generation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07132/) (2026)
- [Side-by-side Comparison Amplifies Dialect Bias in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24384/) (2026)
- [CyrillicQA: The Influence of Phonetically Encoded Secret Language on LLM Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21462/) (2026)
- [Not Safe for All: Auditing the Dialect Penalty in Text-to-Image Safety Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29589/) (2026)
- [Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialects represent a significant component of human culture and are found across all regions of the world. In Germany, more than 40% of the population speaks a regional dialect (Adler and Hansen, 2022). However, despite cultural importance, individuals speaking dialects often face negative societal stereotypes. We examine whether such stereotypes are mirrored by large language models (LLMs). We draw on the sociolinguistic literature on dialect perception to analyze traits commonly associated with dialect speakers. Based on these traits, we assess the dialect naming bias and dialect usage bias expressed by LLMs in two tasks: an association task and a decision task. To assess a model's dialect usage bias, we construct a novel evaluation corpus that pairs sentences from seven regional German dialects (e.g., Alemannic and Bavarian) with their standard German counterparts. We find that: (1) in the association task, all evaluated LLMs exhibit significant dialect naming and dialect usage bias against German dialect speakers, reflected in negative adjective associations; (2) all models reproduce these dialect naming and dialect usage biases in their decision making; and (3) contrary to prior work showing minimal bias with explicit demographic mentions, we find that explicitly labeling linguistic demographics--German dialect speakers--amplifies bias more than implicit cues like dialect usage.